Don S. Batory. From implementation to theory in product synthesis. In Martin Hofmann, Matthias Felleisen, editors, Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2007, Nice, France, January 17-19, 2007. pages 135-136, ACM, 2007. [doi]
Future software development will rely on product synthesis, i.e., the synthesis of code and non-code artifacts for a target component or application. Prior work on feature-based product synthesis can be understood and generalized using elementary ideas from category theory. Doing so reveals (a) practical and previously unrecognized properties that product synthesis tools must satisfy, and (b) non-obvious generalizations of current techniques that will guide future research efforts in automated product development.